Improve your sales pipeline by combining Sales & Marketing efforts

It’s well known that communication is essential to an effective sales and marketing effort. But if you’re using separate tools to manage your marketing and sales, I’m afraid to tell you that you’re ‘old fashioned’. But we’re not here to judge. We’re here to help.

Yes communication is important but the real question is, how are your sales and marketing teams communicating? Is it effective? Is there a more efficient way to do this? Yes. It’s something we’ve focused on from day one.

Here we have our Sales and Marketing people. Two people each with their own tasks. They also each use their own tools. To communicate they have conversations offline, online, over the phone, in numerous meetings and they have to report to their managers.

This communication is important but takes a lot of time, resource and energy. Confusion, when communication fails, can lead to a negative customer journey. After all we’re only human and aren’t all blessed with a Sherlock Holmes ‘mind palace’.

Aside from some obvious differences, your sales and marketing teams are working towards the same goal. They are both trying to grow your business. So sure, communication is essential. But do more meetings, calls and admin cut it in this fast paced world we live in? No. There is a better solution:

Sales and marketing are two halves of the same heart. Pumping the life blood of your business in order to exceed your goals.

Connecting the two creates a fertile environment for collaboration and improvement. We’re not just talking about an increase in sales, conversion speed or the ability to sort and qualify leads quickly. We’re talking about built-in automated communication and increased productivity. Less admin and meetings by default.

The Sales Funnel

Let’s use an example of how SalesSeek improves your team’s output.

The sales funnel is one of the oldest and most effective methods of tracking sales. The first thing you’ll notice is that SalesSeek is built around the funnel, because of the heart of every business are the deals, customers and revenue it brings in. Today in 2016, technology allows us to visualise large amounts of data in smart ways, this is what we’ve achieved with the SalesSeek funnel.

Each of these bubbles represents a deal. The size of the bubble correlates to the size of the deal. The brightness of the deal shows the level of activity, for example, when was the last time you communicated with them and what was the last action.

At the click of a button you can get insights into all activity and tasks that are assigned not just to the deal, but any related organisation, company or individual.

Perhaps Sarah has opened an email from your marketing team numerous times, which might insinuate that she has a keen interest in your product or service, or has shown it to multiple colleagues.

A huge advantage of using SalesSeek is that you have all of your prospects coming into one central database. Every single contact has their own activity feed, tasks, and owner. With integrated Email Marketing, whether you’re sending a campaign to 30 people you’ve recently met at an event or 30,000 subscribers; your whole team can create, schedule, send and analyse all emails from one application.

Traditionally sales and marketing were two silos of information and resource, almost rivals but with one common goal. Today, technology allows teams to truly collaborate, sharing insights and improving clarity on return of investment. Could your team benefit from greater collaboration and communication? Try SalesSeek today with a free trial.

Josh has a passion for all things digital, tech and design. His background is in music and event marketing and management, and has co-ordinated campaigns and events across Europe in multiple languages. Based in London he now manages the marketing for SalesSeek.